De Baking Psychopath

This past weekend, I joined a friend of mine in traveling back to her hometown for a grand endeavor: to make delicious jam!  She decided to make blueberry jam from frozen blueberries, which means we can recreate her masterpiece any time of the year. I had my heart set on marmalade, but since citrus is out of season and not found frozen in large chunks, I decided to make them a supporting role and to instead find a seasonal fruit to be the star so we can remember the summer as it begins to slip away. I settled on Peach-Orange Marmalade. We went to a local orchard to pick up 5 pounds of peaches from the end of the season bounty. Before leaving Pittsburgh, I picked up a few organic citrus from Whole Foods for the recipe. Armed with fresh produce, we embarked on a marathon jam-making session on Saturday. To say the results of both jams were delicious would be a gross understatement.  Her blueberry jam was "the best berry jam" we've ever had. It is ...

For the most part, I'm a morning person. This means that on any given weekend day, I am usually wide-awake by 7 or 8 am (with help from my hungry cats, of course) and have to get out of bed due to an inability to return to sleep and a restless mind. Once the cats are fed and my OCD tendencies to clean up around the kitchen are satisfied, I find myself in the mood for making brunch food. And since I can usually count on a couple hours before the hubby drags himself out of bed (can you guess he's a night owl?), I can get a good start on something delectable to surprise him for his (late) breakfast. Usually I go for making a batch of pancakes or French toast, but one recent weekend, I had my mind fixed on cinnamon buns. A soft and fluffy yeasted bun would be ideal in texture, but with this baking powder-dough version on my radar, the compromise in having a non-traditional coffee cake-like texture was perfectly acceptable in exchange for the advantage of savin...

I live in "Stiller Country"...where the blood of its inhabitants run black and gold. Although we aren't crazy sports fans, we do follow the Steelers for the entire football season and we like to do a lot of armchair coaching all throughout. The great thing about the fanaticism of Steelers' fans is the sense of regional culture that makes living here unique. And the Steelers...well, let's just say that you can count on them to make any season full of drama and suspense. In light of the upcoming Super Bowl, there have been parties (and rallies) throughout the city to celebrate the amazing opportunity for the Steelers to possibly win their seventh Super Bowl ring. My department was no exception, and we were told to bring "tailgating food." I guess tailgating food = cake to me, because what I decided to make was a black and gold swirled bundt cake. I used the Orange Ricotta Pound Cake with Marmalade Glaze from Cake Keeper Cakes by Lauren Chattman. You c...

Zucchini season marches on! So here is yet another variation on the fabulous and versatile quickbread to try while the squashes overrun the markets or your garden. This zucchini bread comes from the cookbook Tartine , brought to us by the founders of the famous San Fran bakery of the same name. The interesting twist to this recipe is the addition of orange marmalade to the batter, which the authors say adds a complementary layer of flavor to the bread and contributes to the moistness of the cake. And this baby is Moist--almost pudding-like in its moistness, due to the high ratio of zucchini to flour in the recipe. It isn't too sweet, and the deep brown crust that develops on the outside (especially the sugar-encrusted top) is rich and crunchy when fresh from the oven. It is also paler in color than previous zucchini breads featured on this blog, due to the use of only white sugar. The biggest problem I had with the flavor profile of this bread was the almost overwhelming flavor ...

These cookies have been a long time coming. I must have printed out the recipe months ago. They're a few of my favorite things wrapped up in one cookie: orange, pecans, oatmeal cookies...sounds great, right? I finally got a good opportunity to bake them for a school event last week, and they turned out delicious! Chewy oatmeal cookies with a good orange-flavor punch, crunchy and buttery pecans, and just a touch of creamy white chocolate with every bite. However, the process was less than delightful, and actually made for an interesting self-study in my character flaws. First, I wanted to use up these quick-cooking oats that my mom had left with me when she last visited, instead of the old-fashioned oats I usually use for baking. Despite Alton Brown's prattle about how the more quick-cooking and instant the oats are correlates to how much more broken down and pre-cooked they are echoing in my brain, I thought, ah, how much difference could it make? Despite my outward nonc...

A third goodbye in the lab within the last 8 months, and the heralding of the end of summer. At least there's cake to make it a little better. I have a love affair with the pairing of orange and chocolate (amongst other things), and I have exploited this well-matched flavor combo on more than one occasion, usually in a drunken cake of some sort, often involving Grand Marnier. I always forget how strong this orange-flavored liquor is (40% alcohol, can you believe it?!) and add too generously, resulting in a chocolate cake with an orange punch in the face. So I made the same mistake this time too, but I tried to remedy it by cooking the jam-liquor mixture on the stove a little bit to burn off a little alcohol. Whether the sugar melded with the liquor enough for me not to notice it as much, or if it really burned off, I can't tell, but in any case, it's already soaked into the cake, so too late! The cake comes from Nigella Lawson , the decadently sensuous Brit who makes her...